A pop a day keeps boredom away!

One of the reasons I enjoy writing this blog so much is that it plays to my strengths. Specifically, as the mother of a nursing infant who doesn’t nap unless he’s being held, I have lots and lots of enforced time to sit and let my mind wander. This allows me to think of lots of ice pop ideas (sadly, the vast majority of them flee my head the second I focus on something else). It does not, however, leave a lot of time for advance prep of ice pop ingredients or materials. Basically, if I have to spend more than 5 minutes or so actually putting together the ingredients for a pop, or if those ingredients need to be prepared any earlier than “immediately before freezing them,” then chances are, that pop isn’t going to get made any time soon. That’s why I’ve been plotting a banana-nutella pop for weeks but haven’t actually gotten around to making it.

Today’s pop was a tiny baby step into changing that attitude, coupled with an experiment to see just how little preparation I can do and still come out with a product that seems like some effort actually went into it.

I needed ginger earlier this week for a dinner recipe, so I bought a rather large hand of it with the thought that I could use the rest to make ice pops of some sort. I knew that probably I’d need to make a ginger syrup in order to get gingery ice pops, but since I’m lazy I decided to try osmosis first.

At around 7 this morning, I cut a 2-inch piece of ginger into several pieces, stirred it into six ounces of lemonade, and stashed it in the fridge. My hope was that the flavor of the ginger would infuse the lemonade with no further effort on my part.

When I took the mixture out of the fridge this evening, things looked promising. The lemonade was definitely cloudier than it had been in the morning, and I could detect a (faint) whiff of the ginger. With high hopes, I poured my pops.
Sadly, I am forced to conclude that osmosis is not the most efficient way of adding ginger flavor to a base. In the finished pops, I could detect a very subtle hint of ginger, but I have a hunch that someone who didn’t know it was there would miss it entirely. There were a few bites with a more pronounced ginger flavor, and those were so good that they encouraged me to keep trying to get more flavor into my pops. I will probably have to break down and make ginger syrup for my next try.